ENTELEC Houston and ISA Calgary

Thanks for making our spring trade shows a success!

May 16, 2015 by

Ted Skinner

Great Shows, Awesome People

This industry is so dynamic!

I had a chance to catch up with not only a number of our customers but also quite a few of our vendors this spring while we were exhibiting at ENTELEC in Houston and ISA in Calgary. It was a great time to brainstorm and discuss opportunities for collaboration. I was encouraged by how interested our vendors were in working together to help our customers and how much our customers appreciated that we have a broad portfolio of inter-related products that we can apply across many vertical markets.

Here are a few snippets of some of what was happening at the shows.

Kepware Technologies

It was nice to have a chat with Adam Kennedy from Kepware at ISA Calgary and with Dan Turner at both ENTELEC and ISA. For many years Kepware's OPC products have made it possible for us to provide innovative solutions for our customers.

Kepware's seamless integration of OPC UA throughout all of their communications drivers makes it possible for us to integrate information from many different systems.

For us this means we can take diagnostic information from a wide variety of wireless communications devices and provide an interface for our customers that they can easily use to see what is happening on their networks that support their SCADA Systems.

4RF

4RF had a big contingent of their team from around the globe at ENTELEC. Once again they are innovating on the licenced narrowband radio front. This year at ENTELEC they announced a Migration Master Station that enables our customers to easily migrate their radio networks from legacy systems to the advanced Aprisa SR+ radios. They also came out with a firmware upgrade to enable the Aprisa SR+ to support the Mirrored Bit protocol.

Cradlepoint

Last fall DCI became a Cradlepoint Partner in Canada. This opened up our ability to provide industrial grade cellular routers to our customers. Mike Adamson from Cradlepoint came up from Boise to participate in the Calgary ISA show. What a great opportunity it was to learn more about how to provide solutions to our customers and for Mike to see more of what the market is like here in Western Canada.

Calamp

While at ENTELEC I was able to meet a number of folks that have recently joined the Calamp team and it was nice to put faces to the names. Having been a long term Solution Provider for Calamp I was encouraged to see that Calamp is still seeking ways to support and provide customer solutions in the Narrowband Wireless market.

These shows typically provide opportunities to think about cooperative ways to solve connectivity and performance monitoring needs for customer's networks. We also often come home with new ideas and this year was no exception.

ISA Knowledge Bar

This year at the ISA show they had a new venue called a Knowledge Bar. When folks registered for the show they had an opportunity to sign up for a Knowledge Bar session. I conducted the first session of the show with a discussion about how to efficiently monitor an extensive variety of network devices, including cellular modems and narrow bandwidth devices such as licensed radios, without impacting network performance.

We had a good turnout and I enjoyed the interactive format of the event. It was quite noisy where it was located so that provided a communication challenge, but hey, communications challenges are a lot of what DCI is about!

There was good feedback from a wide variety of skill sets from the participants. It enforced my belief that those of us that have been in this industry for a long time need to continue to strategically plan to mentor and train up the next generation of professionals.

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